Greatly above-average temperatures in Antarctica have contributed to the back-to-back daily records.
By Christina van Waasbergen, Courthouse News Service
Monday marked Earth’s hottest day in recorded history — breaking a record only set the day before, according to data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Earth saw a record-high average daily temperature of 62.87 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, the EU climate monitor said, breaking the previous record of 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit set just the day before. Copernicus’s data on average global temperatures goes back to 1940.
“What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”
The average global temperature typically reaches its annual peak between late June and early August, when it’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, Copernicus said. The large land masses in the Northern Hemisphere warm up faster than the oceans in the southern hemisphere can cool down, meaning the seasonal patterns of the northern half of the world drive overall global temperatures.
“The global average temperature was already at near-record levels in recent days, slightly below the levels of 2023, after being at record levels for the time of year for more than a year,” Copernicus said in a statement.
The climate monitor said the sudden temperature increase is related to greatly above-average temperatures over large parts of Antarctica.
“Such large anomalies are not unusual during the Antarctic winter months, and also contributed to the record global temperatures in early July 2023,” Copernicus said. “What’s more, Antarctic sea ice extent is almost as low as it was at this time last year, leading to much above-average temperatures over parts of the Southern Ocean.”
2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 may be on track to beat that, Copernicus said.
This month, Copernicus reported that each of the past 13 months has been the hottest on record. Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an article published in the journal Nature in March that this temperature increase has exceeded climate experts’ predictions.
“A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations,” Schmidt wrote. “Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.”
